INCLUDES BLACK RIGHT THE FREEDOM RIDERS Freedom Rides

INCLUDES BLACK RIGHT

THE FREEDOM RIDERS – – – Freedom Rides were journeys by Civil Rights activists on interstate buses into the segregated southern United States to test the United States Supreme Court decision Boynton v. Virginia, (1960) 364 U. S. that ended segregation for passengers engaged in inter-state travel. Organized by CORE, the first Freedom Ride of the 1960 s left Washington D. C. on May 4, 1961, and was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17. [14] During the first and subsequent Freedom Rides, activists traveled through the Deep South to integrate seating patterns and desegregate bus terminals, including restrooms and water fountains. That proved to be a dangerous mission. In Anniston, Alabama, one bus was firebombed, forcing its passengers to flee for their lives. In Birmingham, Alabama, an FBI informant reported that Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor gave Ku Klux Klan or KKK members 15 minutes to attack an incoming group of freedom riders before having police "protect" them. The riders were severely beaten "until it looked like a bulldog had got a hold of them. “ The student movement involved such celebrated figures as John Lewis, the single-minded activist who "kept on" despite many beatings and harassments; James Lawson, the revered "guru" of nonviolent theory and tactics; Diane Nash, an articulate and intrepid public champion of justice; Bob Moses, pioneer of voting registration in Mississippi —the most rural and most dangerous part of the South; and James Bevel, a fiery preacher and charismatic organizer and facilitator. Other prominent student activists included ; Bernard Lafayette; ; ; Julian Bond (associated with Atlanta University); Hosea Williams; and Stokely Carmichael (who later changed his name to Kwame Ture).

BLACK POWER! • • • At the same time King was finding himself at odds with factions of the Democratic Party, he was facing challenges from within the Civil Rights Movement to the two key tenets upon which the movement had been based: integration and non-violence. Black activists within SNCC and CORE had chafed for some time at the influence wielded by white advisors to civil rights organizations and the disproportionate attention that was given to the deaths of white civil rights workers while black workers' deaths often went virtually unnoticed. Stokely Carmichael, who became the leader of SNCC in 1966, was one of the earliest and most articulate spokespersons for what became known as the "Black Power" movement after he used that slogan, coined by activist and organizer , in Greenwood, Mississippi on June 17, 1966. Black Power was made most public however by the Black Panther Party which founded in Oakland, California, in 1966. This group followed ideology stated by Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam using a "by-any-means necessary" approach to stopping inequality. They sought to rid African American neighborhoods of Police Brutality and had a ten-point plan amongst other things. Their dress code consisted of leather jackets, berets, light blue shirts, and an afro hairstyle. They are best remembered for setting up free breakfast programs, referring to police officers as "pigs", displaying shotguns and a black power fist, and often using the statement of "Power to the people. “ King was not comfortable with the "Black Power" slogan, which sounded too much like black nationalism to him. SNCC activists, in the meantime, began embracing the "right to self-defense" in response to attacks from white authorities, and booed King for continuing to advocate non-violence. When King was murdered in 1968, Stokely Carmichael stated that whites murdered the one person who would prevent rampant rioting and burning of major cities down and that blacks would burn every major city to the ground. In every major city from Boston to San Francisco, racial riots broke out in the black community following King's death and as a result, "White Flight" occurred from several cities leaving Blacks in a dilapidated and nearly unrepairable city.

• • RACE RIOTS PART 1 By the end of World War II, more than half of the country's black population lived in Northern and Western industrial cities rather than Southern rural areas. [citation needed] Migrating to those cities for better job opportunities, education and to escape legal segregation, African Americans often found segregation that existed in fact rather than in law. While after the 1920 s, the Ku Klux Klan was not prevalent, by the 1960 s other problems prevailed in northern cities. Beginning in the 1950 s, there had been deindustrialization and restructuring of major areas of the economies: railroads and meatpacking, steel industry and car industry. As the last population to enter the industrial job market, blacks were disadvantaged by its collapse. At the same time, investment in highways and private development of suburbs in the postwar years had drawn many ethnic whites out of the cities to newer housing in expanding suburbs. Urban blacks who did not follow the middle class out of the cities became concentrated in the older housing of inner-city neighborhoods, among the poorest in most major cities. Because jobs in new service areas and parts of the economy were being created in suburbs, unemployment was much higher in many black than in white neighborhoods, and crime was frequent. African Americans rarely owned the stores or businesses where they lived. Many were limited to menial or blue-collar jobs, although union organizing in the 1930 s and 1940 s had opened up good working environments for some. African Americans often made only enough money to live in dilapidated tenements that were privately owned, or poorly maintained public housing. They also attended schools that were often the worst academically in the city and that had fewer white students than in the decades before WWII.

RACE RIOTS PART 2 • • With black militancy on the rise, increased acts of anger were now directed at the police. Black residents growing tired of police brutality continued to riot. Some young people joined groups such as the Black Panthers, whose popularity was based in part on their reputation for confronting police officers. Riots occurred in 1966 and 1967 in cities such as Atlanta, San Francisco, Oakland, Baltimore, Seattle, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Newark, Chicago, New York City (specifically in Brooklyn, Harlem and the Bronx), and worst of all in Detroit. In Detroit, a comfortable black middle class had begun to develop among families of blacks who worked at well-paying jobs in the automotive industry. [citation needed] Blacks who had not moved upward were living in much worse conditions, subject to the same problems as blacks in Watts and Harlem. When white police officers shut down an illegal bar on a liquor raid and arrested a large group of patrons, furious residents rioted. One significant effect of the Detroit riot was the acceleration of "white flight, " the trend of white residents moving from inner-city neighborhoods to predominantly white suburbs. Detroit experienced "middle class black flight" as well. Cities such as Detroit, Newark, and Baltimore now have less than 40% white population as a result of these riots and other social changes. Changes in industry caused continued job losses, depopulation of middle classes, and concentrated poverty in such cities. They contain some of the worst living conditions for blacks anywhere in America. [citation needed]

The Civil Rights Movement 1960 -1980 part 1 • • • In 1960 black college students sat down at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in North Carolina and refused to leave. Their sit-in captured media attention and led to similar demonstrations throughout the South. The next year, civil rights workers organized "freedom rides, " in which blacks and whites boarded buses heading South toward segregated terminals, where confrontations might capture media attention and lead to change. They also organized rallies, the largest of which was the "March on Washington" in 1963. More than 200, 000 people gathered in the nation's capital to demonstrate their commitment to equality for all. The high point of a day of songs and speeches came with the address of Martin Luther King Jr. , who had emerged as the preeminent spokesman for civil rights. "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood, " King proclaimed. Each time he used the refrain "I have a dream, " the crowd roared. But the rhetoric of the civil rights movement at first failed to bring progress. President Kennedy was initially reluctant to press white Southerners for support on civil rights because he needed their votes on other issues. But events forced his hand. When James Meredith was denied admission to the University of Mississippi in 1962 on account of his race, Kennedy sent federal troops to uphold the law. After protests aimed at the desegregation of Birmingham, Alabama, prompted a violent response by the police, he sent Congress a new civil rights bill mandating the integration of public places. Not even the "March on Washington, " however, could extricate the measure from a congressional committee, where it was still bottled up when Kennedy was assassinated.

The Civil Rights Movement 1960 -1980 part 2 • President Johnson was more successful. A Southerner from Texas, he became committed to civil rights as he sought national office. In 1963, he told Congress: "No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill. " Using all his authority, he persuaded the Senate to limit debate and secured the passage of the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in all public accommodations. The next year, he pressed further for what became the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It authorized the federal government to appoint examiners to register voters where local officials made black registration impossible. The year after passage, 400, 000 blacks registered in the deep South; by 1968 the number reached 1 million and nationwide the number of black elected officials increased substantially. Finally, in 1968, the Congress passed legislation banning discrimination in housing. • Violence accompanied militant calls for reform. Riots broke out in several big cities in 1966 and 1967. In the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King fell before an assassin's bullet. Several months later, Senator Robert Kennedy, a spokesman for the disadvantaged, an opponent of the Vietnam War and the brother of the slain president, met the same fate. To many these two assassinations marked the end of an era of innocence and idealism in both civil rights and the anti-war movements. The growing militancy on the left, coupled with an inevitable conservative backlash, opened a rift in the nation's psyche which took years to heal. • The backlash against preferential treatment for minorities became even more public in a Supreme Court case in 1978. Allan Bakke, a white man, claimed that a quota reserving places for minority applicants was responsible for the rejection of his application to medical school in California. The court ordered his admission, arguing that quotas could no longer be imposed, but then upheld the consideration of race as one of the relevant factors in selection procedures. Nevertheless, the controversy over busing and affirmative action sometimes obscured the steady march of many African Americans into the ranks of the middle class and suburbia throughout these tumultuous years. •

Credits William Vadym Joel amato